ven before the official
breakup of the Soviet Union
in December 1991, Central
Asians began to reclaim
their history. In Alma-Ata,
capital of Kazakhstan, for example, civic leaders changed the name of one of their major thoroughfares from Gorky Street to Jibek Joly-Kazakh for what English speakers call the "Great Silk Road," the fabled trade route that ran through Central Asia in ancient times. The renaming was but one of countless syrn- bolic gestures in a process that Uzbek hi...
he many architectural
splendors of Samarkand-
the mosques, religious
schools, shrines, and mau-
soleums, sparkling even to-
day with glazed tiles in la- pis, turquoise, and gold-owe largely to the efforts of one man, the legendary con- queror known to the West as Tamerlane. A Turkicized Mongol from the Barlas tribe, Timur (1336-1405) ruled a vast empire that stretched at its height from India to Anato- lia and Damascus. Endowed with artistic vi- sion as well as military prowess, Timur la...
Those familiar with Central gan with the highest of hopes. In the early Asia's ancient history and days of the Bolshevik struggle, many native civilization might assume leaders in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and that the Soviet era-a mere other Muslim areas looked favorably upon 70 years of alien domina- Lenin's revolution. They saw it not so much tion-could have left few as the beginning of a new socialist era but
scars on people who since time immemo- as the end of Russian imperialist domina-
rial...
Imagine an American think-tank in operation in 1900. A generous
benefactor has given it a grant to
look into the future and contem-
plate the far-fetched possibility that
European colonial empires might become independent nations by the end of the 20th century. Looking at Asia, its re- searchers compare prospects for two large colonial regions-British India and Rus- sian Turkestan. Which would then have ap- peared to be a better candidate for success- ful evolution into a modem nation-state?
Consider t...
CENTRAL ASIA
0ne problem in the study of Central Asia is
defining the region's geographical limits.
A narrow but precise definition limits the re-
gion to the five former Soviet republics that lie
to the east of the Ural Mountains and the Cas-
pian Sea and to the west of China. But the defi-
nition can be expanded to include some or all
of the following: Chinese Turkestan, (Xinjiang
Province), Afghanistan, northeastern Iran,
Mongolia, Tibet, Azerbaijan, and the entire Eur-
asian st...
Things were different when I
was young. As I prepared, in 1962, to cycle from Ireland to India, no one thought to ask me if I was going in order to celebrate feminine auton-
omy, or to get my own country in perspec- tive, or to acquire heroic standing in the public eye. Nobody inquired if I was at- tempting to escape from a world in which I felt a misfit or to test or find or run away from myself. People just thought that I was crazy and made no further comment, Thirty years ago my sort of...
During the 1970s, Time and Esquire ran articles about the "healing energy" of pyramid power. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist bombarded the Great Pyramid at Giza with cosmic rays to discover its secrets. New Age devotees erected small pyramids in which to meditate and make love. Was this only one more passing fad? Perhaps not. Daniel Boorstin reveals that many respected figures in Western history-including Sir Isaac Newton and Napoleon Bonaparte-have been intrigued by the Egyptian pyramids. T...
the Univ. of Chicago's Grad. School of Public Policy and the Social Science Research Council, Oct. 1991.
Author: William Julius Wilson
In his much-noted 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged, Uni-versity of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson pinned on the economy much of the blame for the troubling rise in mother-only families among black Americans. Today, 5 1.1 percent of black children live in such families. In roughly half of those families the par- ents were never wed. Jobless- ness among...
?
A Survey of Papers from a Conference on Popular Culture
When Euro Disnevland ovened near Paris this year, many French intellectuals were far from pleased. One writer, Jean Cau, sounding a little like Donald Duck at his angriest, called the theme park "a horror made of cardboard, plas- tic and appalling colors, a construction of hard- ened chewing gum and idiotic folklore taken straight out of comic books written for obese Americans." And novelist Jean-Marie Rouart grimly warned, &...
Garry Wills, "The Words America" in The Atlantic (June 1992), 745 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 02116.